Dr Samuel Forster | NHMRC CJ Martin Biomedical Fellow

Forster, Samuel

Sam's work combines microbiology, immunology and computational analysis to understand the functional role and community dynamics of the human microbiota in health and disease.

Understanding how our microbiota is acquired and the forces that cause it to change provides important insights into health and disease. Sam's research seeks to understand the relationship between host state, microbiota community and the susceptibility to diseases including inflammatory bowel disease and infections by opportunistic pathogens such as Clostridium difficile. His research is focused on:

Metagenomic sequencing from large patient cohorts to understand microbiota community structure in health and disease and the factors that cause it to change

Computational modelling and machine learning based approaches to understand microbiota community dynamics in health and dysbiotic disease

Analysis of the diversity of host cellular and transcriptional responses using in-vitro and in-vivo models of human microbiota communities

This work ultimately seeks to provide novel bacteriotherapies and identify other therapeutic interventions to improve human health